PRs rejoice: Google Analytics will answer our daft questions!

'Well there's a lot of dark arts stuff that happens in the background John'.

This is one of the more sinister and opaque quotes I remember when querying an invoice from an SEO agency.

They always seemed to communicate in such a mysterious manner that I'm sure Merlin would have been an SEO expert if he'd not been a mythical wizard.

And much like the serfs that were featured in the Arthurian legends, public relations professionals would bow their heads and dimly agree that they couldn't possibly decipher the rich tapestry of the SEO market, and would, forever, remain ignorant.

But like all great moments in history, the peasants are rising!

The PR industry has become more comfortable with both the technical and creative side of optimising content and assets for search.

Now, with this latest development from Google, no one will have the excuse that they're too daft to understand search data.

Soon we'll be able to simply type into Google Analytics 'how many visits did we have last month' and lo, we will be served an answer.

Of course, as was pointed out in this rather good econsultancy article, you still need to know the right questions to ask it, we haven't quite reached that level of fool-proof intuition.

But it's a start and the more we can democratise and simplify data, in a bid to understand business outcomes, the better we'll all be.

Viva la revolution.

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"How did traffic from search change year-on-year in June?"
In the coming weeks, Google Analytics users will be able to ask questions like this and have them answered in seconds thanks to natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) technology Google is integrating into its popular analytics platform.